Yemen’s embattled president, in exile in Saudi Arabia, on friday announced a Cabinet reshuffle in a major step toward closing a dangerous rift between his internationally recognized government and southern separatists backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s decree said that Yemeni Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed would keep his job while 24 ministerial posts would have almost equal representation of both northerners and southerners, according to the country’s state-run SABA news agency.
The reshuffle included women, for the first time since the 1990s.
Photo: Reuters
Yemeni ministers of defense, Mohammed al-Maqdishi, and finance, Salem Saleh Bin Braik kept their jobs in the new government.
Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak, who was Yemen’s ambassador to the US, was named minister of foreign affairs, replacing Mohammed Abdullah al-Hadrami, who was critical of the UAE.
UN special envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths welcomed the reshuffle as a “pivotal step toward a lasting political resolution to the conflict in Yemen.”
Naming a new government was part of a power-sharing deal between Saudi-backed Hadi and the Emirati-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council, an umbrella group of militias seeking to restore an independent South Yemen, which existed from 1967 until unification in 1990.
The council had been the on-the-ground allies of the UAE, once Saudi Arabia’s main partner in the war that subsequently withdrew from the conflict.
The secessionists declared self-rule over the key port city of Aden and several southern provinces in April, before it abandoned its aspirations for self-rule late in July to implement the peace agreement with Hadi’s exiled government.
The power-sharing deal, inked in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh last year, was meant to end months of infighting between what are nominal allies in Yemen’s civil war that pits a Saudi-backed coalition, of which the UAE is a part, against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
The deal also called for the appointment of a new governor and security director for Aden, the formal seat of Hadi’s government since the Houthis took over the capital, Sana’a, in 2014.
The Saudi-led coalition, determined to restore Hadi’s government to power, in 2015 launched a military intervention.
The power-sharing deal also included the withdrawal of rival forces from Aden and the flashpoint southern province of Abyan.
The Saudi-led coalition said that the withdrawal was completed earlier this week.
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